Embracing the Dead
by Merrin
Summary: Spike and Buffy: no apology needed. After 'Dead Things'. A little dark.


**Title:**

Embracing the Dead

**Author:**

Merrin

**Disclaimer:**

All characters and settings are the property of Joss Whedon. They are **not mine.**

**Note:**

This scene takes place somewhere between season 6's 'Dead Things', in which Buffy delivers a vicious beating to Spike and 'Older and Far Away', Buffy's birthday party. I, like many others, wondered why Buffy offered no apology for the beating. That's the source of this meditation.

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Since the night of the beating, Spike knew that Buffy had tried to stay away. He believed that she felt guilt. If they ever spoke to each other, ever did anything other than have sex, he would tell her he understood. Why she battered the one who stood in her way. Why she left him lying in the alley, his face bloodied by her frustration.

He wasn't surprised when she inevitably barged into his crypt, sooner rather than later, and very much against her own resolutions. He was lying on top of the sarcophagus. Not really asleep, but in a kind of stasis. A healing trance. She reached out with an open hand to touch his bruised face. Perhaps she meant it as an apology. Spike was suddenly afraid of her softness. If she were tender toward him, It would be like it was before. She would close herself off from him.

Spike turned his head away, as if to say, 'Keep your pity. Not worthy of either of us, demon and slayer.' Then he murmured, as he had done the night she beat him, "You only hurt the one you love."

She always caused him pain. Pain that was pleasure. Pain in all the right places. And now pain because she was kissing him so fiercely. His lips were still swollen, face purple and black with bruises. She looked into his eyes, searching. He showed her that he still loved her. The demon Spike still loved her. She could also see that he hated loving her. That only made her seize him more desperately. Gripping his shoulders with hands that had been fists. Her small hands gripping his shoulders with as much savagery as she had given the fists she had driven into his face last night. Or was it the night before?

When she bit him, 'love-bites' that drew blood, he bit her back, with his human teeth. He wanted to say, 'I feel it, too. Now you understand. How love is like hate. How we've always loved each other in this way. My strength is equal to absorbing your anger. Your strong body can absorb my passion. My body's desperation to be inside of you. Every ounce of my strength I use to penetrate you. If that is my act of violence upon you, then I accept your blows as your act of violence on me.'

Their first sexual encounter had been a revelation to him. Before, so angry with her, needing to cause her wounds with sharp-edged words and jabs. Absorbing the shocks of her cruel words and her powerful punches. Then, as if her fists were not enough to show him her contempt, a hard kiss, her mouth coming to his. There was so much anger and desire in that kiss, fueled by the violence still raging inside of her. It shocked him, almost brought him to his knees. He had to match her intensity, and he found it inside himself, not knowing whether it was hatred or passion or both, not caring, just knowing that he had to go on kissing her until it destroyed him, or both of them.

'A bloody revelation,' he thought.

When he told her (it seemed so long ago) that she treated him like a man, he had been wrong to accept that as his due. He wasn't a man. To treat him like a man was to put him safely out of the way.

All of his tender ministrations when she had first come back from death, those simple offerings had met the blank wall of her resistance. She was cocooned, muffled. He knew that his gentle words and his careful, hesitant touches were not worthy of the slayer. Or her strength. He wasn't surprised when they were ultimately rejected.

'If I could just break through,' he thought, over and over. He actually felt a tremor of apprehension to meet what was inside of her. Feared that it would be too much for him, too strong for him.

The night of their first coupling, it was like she had opened herself to him. Sometimes, the face he looked into when he was inside of her was the same face she wore when she had tried to stake him, many times, years ago. In his mind, he called it her true face: what was underneath the facade that she showed the rest of the world. No one else saw it, but him. No one else.

Once, as her enemy, he had also feared that her strength would be too much for him. Now, he thinks, maybe it is. She will achieve what she set out to do, so long ago. She will destroy him.

Now, this night, they coupled again. It was just as frenzied, just as passionate as the first time, and the many times after. There was pain for him, as there always was, in the grip of her hands, her arms, her body. He knew that he surely must inflict pain on her, too, because he held nothing back. But she absorbed it into the strength of her slayer's body and reached out hungrily for more. His face was still bruised, his lips becoming more swollen from her deep, grinding kisses.

The only pain that he can't accept is her turning away. As soon as the sex act is finished, she turns away, but not without a brief look that shows him her confusion; he sees that she doesn't understand. She doesn't recognize that it's love that she feels. In her mind, it is the energy of her hatred that drives her to mount him and grind herself onto him. Hatred of him, of his kind, and of herself, for embracing the dead so willingly.

This is the only pain that sears him. But he can't turn away. Will never turn away.

END


End file.
